Dominic Smith

How did you become a writer?

When I was about ten my family experienced tragedy—my mother had a stroke at the age of 37 and, in the same year, our house burned down. These events turned me to writing as a place where I could control the fates of other people’s lives. My interest in writing intensified throughout my undergraduate degree at the University of Iowa, where I took fiction workshops, and into my MFA at the Michener Center for Writers here in Austin, Texas. As I see it now, it all began with me writing serial spy stories before the age of twelve.

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.).

I’m drawn to stylists like James Salter and Don DeLillo. Flannery O’Connor has been important to me in the way that she flirts with high drama while keeping the action deeply psychological. Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway is one of the most perfect novels I know. Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda was the book that made me want to write historical fiction. I’ve also been lucky enough to have some amazing writers as teachers, each of whom taught me something distinctive about process: Joy Williams, Dennis Johnson, James Magnuson, Elizabeth Harris, Stephen Harrigan, Anthony Giardina.

When and where do you write?

I write early in the morning, five days a week, for 2-4 hours, depending on the day. It happens either in my living room or in my backyard studio—a 10x12 room with nothing but books and a desk inside.

What are you working on now?

I’m working on a new novel that takes place in the world of early cinema—a slice of time when Edison and the Lumière brothers were competing for the same American eyeballs. In a way, it’s a return to material that I discovered in a short story I published a decade ago called The Projectionist.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

There are certainly days when it feels like nothing is flowing, where the conceit or the writing itself seems lacking. But I've learned to accept this as part of the normal writing practice. I strongly believe that inspiration comes out of the work. We shouldn’t wait for inspiration to strike as a condition for writing. We develop the practice, do the work, and inspiration comes. Writing is muscular and requires a regimen.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Read widely, experiment with form and voice. Be willing to fail. Develop discipline about when and how you write. Begin crafting your life so you can solve how to make a livelihood while still carving out time to write on a regular schedule.

Dominic Smith is the author of four novels, most recently of The Last Painting of Sara de Vos (Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2016). His short fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and appeared in The Atlantic, Texas Monthly and the Chicago Tribune. More details can be found at his website: www.dominicsmith.net.

Boris Fishman

How did you become a writer?

This is like asking someone who he is. It can be answered well in ten words, or a thousand, but not something in between. I'll try: Due to various psychological family circumstances having to do with being Jewish in the Soviet Union and immigrants to America -- that is, life-long outsiders -- I grew up with several traits that help a writer, specifically acute sensitivity and observation; expressiveness; and the self-confidence to speak up. Due to some of the same circumstances, I spent a lot of time after college trying to be happy doing something more stable. Finally, I found the courage, or recklessness, to decide that if I was going to be miserable, I should be miserable on behalf of something I love, and applied for MFA programs in fiction.

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.). 

I admire morally preoccupied writers, serious writers, writers who think about the human condition (no matter how local their story), and yet do all of this without forgetting what a story is. I'm talking about Graham Greene, William Styron, the J. M. Coetzee of Disgrace, the Turgenev of Fathers and Sons, Bernard Malamud, and so on. When I was a teenager, my first love was Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Then I passed on to the Jim Harrison of Legends of the Fall and Returning to Earth. Then it was Malamud, who is all over my first novel. And now Greene and Styron and the rest. As for craft, John Gardner, for all his foibles, has always done more for me than anyone else. 

When and where do you write? 

I have a large desk in my living room. It was the first thing I got into this apartment, from a thrift shop, ten years ago, and it's probably still my favorite thing in it. (As a novice home decorator, I had neglected to measure the width of the door, and had to have it taken off its hinges to fit it.) I live on the 15th floor on the Lower East Side, and look out on a very nice piece of sky. I sit here from 8:30 to 2 or 3PM, first reading someone else, and then writing, Monday through Friday. I can't do it with other people around and I can't do it with noise. Can't do without the latter in New York City, though, so probably even after I'm dead, I will hear the children on recess in the school across the street; the crew of Indian construction workers eternally jackhammering the sidewalk in front of my building; and the train clattering across the Williamsburg Bridge. After ten years, that is no longer noise. 

What are you working on now? 

I've been working on a Ukrainian cookbook -- it's the recipes of the woman who looks after my grandfather, but between the lines, or dishes I should say, it's a memoir of everything she has come to mean to us, and we to her.  

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? 

No. If I did, I would go see a psychoanalyst; when I have in the past, it's been exceedingly revealing, and knot-resolving.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Be more serious than anyone you know. Work harder than anyone you know. Treat it like a job and write regularly -- every chance that your life circumstances allow. (If you have a full-time job and a family, maybe you can carve out only one hour Saturday and Sunday each -- but then write every Saturday and Sunday for an hour.) Waste no time doubting yourself -- the world will take care of that for you. Be arrogantly indifferent to what anyone but a small circle of people who understand what you're trying to do -- not synonymous with positive evaluations of your work -- has to say. Minimize in your life the role of friends and relatives who are constantly on you with "well-meaning" doubt and skepticism. Go live in a cheap place. Find part-time work that takes stress off writing as an income stream, and takes you out of your head, and brings you in contact with other people. And read a lot -- A LOT.

Boris Fishman was born in Minsk, Belarus, and immigrated to the United States in 1988 at nine. His journalism, essays, and criticism have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The London Review of Books, The Wall Street Journal, and many other publications. His first novel, A Replacement Life, received a rave on the front cover of The New York Times Book Review. It also won the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award and the American Library Association’s Sophie Brody Medal, and was one of The New York Times' 100 Notable Books, and a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Pick. His second novel, Don't Let My Baby Do Rodeo, about an immigrant family in New Jersey that adopts a boy from Montana who turns out to be feral, comes out from HarperCollins today.

Nathan Heller

How did you become a writer?

My parents read aloud to me for a bizarrely long time. Even when I was eight or so, and literate, we would share books: I’d be reading, and I’d hand the novel over to them, and they’d read a few pages out loud. 

At one point, I handed my mother The Hound of the Baskervilles, and she read aloud the scene in which Watson first arrives at Baskerville Hall. There’s a great description of the hall’s façade. My mother paused and said, “See how he does that?” By “he,” she meant the author, Doyle. Until then, I had always thought that writers transcribed stories from their minds onto the page. The idea they were making decisions, that there was a dazzling way to “do" a description, that you could change readers’ experiences through the words you chose—basically, that there was a craft to it all—came as a revelation to me. I immediately began writing down my own terrible things, mostly Arthur Conan Doyle knockoffs. I lived in California. I was constantly describing people wearing "dressing gowns."

For years after that, I worked to become something other than a writer. But every time I had a break from school, I seemed to spend it writing things. I felt most confident and capable and useful when I wrote. Eventually, I'd surrendered. 

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.).

The list would be manageable if I named people who haven’t influenced me. I remember that one summer, when I was fifteen or sixteen, I read two very unlikely books back-to-back: Swann’s Way and The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. I read the Proust because I had recently seen two adulatory mentions of Proust in magazines or something—I wanted to see what the fuss was about. I read the Kuhn because I saw the book at a garage sale and liked the cover. I missed just about everything about their contexts, but I was old enough to “get” them in a basic way. I could see what they were doing, and it blew my hat off. Even today, I feel as if those two books are most responsible for the architecture of my brain, the way I think (to the extent I think). 

Some of my best influences these days are my colleagues at The New Yorker. I’m constantly studying how so-and-so did such-and-such, trying to incorporate a version of the move into my own stuff. I would name names, but we’d be here forever. You could basically run down the roster of staffers. 

When and where do you write? 

The apartment I live in came with a basement storage room. I turned the room into a kind of derelict office. There are two half-sunken windows. People with elaborate strollers often peer in at me as I work. Around the neighborhood, I am thought to be like Ruprecht, in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels—someone’s loony brother underground.

I work at the first desk—the only desk—I bought after school. It is an Ikea breakfast table, about thirty inches square. That's what I could afford at the time, and it still works well. The important thing about a breakfast table is that it has no drawers. Desks with drawers seem insane to me. You cannot move your legs, and you are constantly banging your knees. You put things in the drawers and forget about them. No thank you! 

I have always wanted to be an early-morning writer, but most of the writing I do in the early morning seems to have been composed by a demented person. I am better by ten or eleven. I often work into the night, because it’s beautiful, private, quiet time. At 1 a.m., nobody calls, and nobody e-mails. There is no news and no "viral content." You can drink coffee and focus on the page. It's heaven. 

What are you working on now? 

I have jobs at two places, The New Yorker and Vogue. At any given moment, I usually have two or three things on the burner at each, in various stages of production. Over the next couple of weeks, I’m wrapping up a critical essay, writing a couple of midlength profiles, and, I hope, travelling to launch a reporting project. 

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? 

Not in any protracted way, but I am blocked-ish every day. Writing is very hard for me. A blank page is, literally, blank. Unless you’re, say, a newswriter and know you have to get X, Y, and Z in the first paragraph, you are working without models or cues. The way you start, the route you take, the tone you use—all of these are willed out of the great eternal nothingness. That doesn’t even account for all the smaller calculations. (What word comes next? Will this slow down the paragraph?) You’re perpetually making tiny choices, each of which affects other choices. It’s an inefficient, brain-taxing process, full of dead ends and wasted hours. But the more you work, the faster, lighter, and more effortless the result seems. Blocks are a part of the writing. If you do it well, they leave no trace. 

What’s your advice to new writers?

Don’t do it! It’s a difficult, vulnerable, obsessive, unglamorous, financially imperilled, often thankless, generally crazy-making vocation. Almost anything would serve you better. Get out now. You’ll thank me. 

If you proceed despite this wise and excellent counsel—if the idea of writing nothing seems, inexplicably, more distressing and disturbing than the terrifying fate I’ve just described—then you are probably a writer, and you don’t need advice. You’ll be fine. 

Nathan Heller is a staff writer at The New Yorker and a contributing editor at Vogue. He has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award in essays and criticism.